Dr. Atul Gawande a surgeon, Harvard professor, and author of more than 40 New York Times bestsellers explained why the American Health Care Act (Trumpcare) was a bad replacement for Obamacare. Dr. Gawande described Trumpcare as an Obamacare replacement that is not sane or credible.
Video:
Transcript via ABC’s This Week:
GAWANDE: Right, it cuts the 70 million people on Medicaid by about a quarter. And for the rest of the people, there’s a cap, whether it’s the elderly in nursing homes, people who are working poor, the cap would mean that the coverage becomes limited.
STEPHANOPUOLOS: And then, finally, because of the way they affect the subsidies, some older and sicker Americans will be paying more.
GAWANDE: Yes. People who are over 50 can be charged under this new bill up to five times more than younger people.
STEPHANOPOULOS: But how about if you take the flip side, right, it’s very clear right now for a lot of younger and healthier Americans, their premiums have gone up under Obamacare. We have also seen insurance companies facing losses. A lot of insurance companies facing losses in states most recently like Virginia and Iowa, big insurance companies pulling out of those states. That fuels the president’s argument, the speaker’s argument that Obamacare is collapsing.
GAWANDE: So, of course what’s happening is that there’s uncertainty in the market about will there be subsidies, will there be mandates? And so the insurers don’t know how to price and are pulling out.
Here’s the thing to understand is that this is not — this is a bill that makes each measure of health and health care worse, rather than better than under Obamacare. It’s not a proposal that anybody would put forward as a credible or sane proposal for solving the problems in Obamacare.
STEPHANOPOULOS; Why not?
GAWANDE: Well, the core reasons are, number one, it doesn’t have the — the subsidies. So, by cutting the subsidies substantially, we’re taking $1 trillion away from support for people’s health care in the bottom 40 percent, and returning it as a tax cut to the top 2 percent. So, you take $1 trillion of support out of health care where it’s ending income-based subsidies, turning them into age-based subsidies. And hat ends up hurting people across the board, especially in that bottom 40 percent.
The reason why Trumpcare is not a sane or credible replacement for the ACA is that it isn’t a healthcare bill. The American Health Care Act (Trumpcare0 is a tax cut for the top two percent of earners disguised as a healthcare bill.
Trumpcare harms patients by taking away their health insurance and making coverage more expensive. There is no replacing done in the Republican Obamacare replacement. The bill is a rollback of health insurance coverage and benefits. The legislation will be very bad for patients, especially patients who need the most medical care.
There is a reason why the health care sector is speaking out against this legislation. From a treatment point of view what Republicans are proposing is insane. It will make the system worse, not better, and it makes health care more expensive and available to fewer Americans.
Trumpcare is a bad deal that must be rejected by the American people.
Awards and Professional Memberships
Member of the Society of Professional Journalists and The American Political Science Association
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